Competing with television and other studios on the skids, Daiei dips into the well of "erotic grotesque nonsense" with BLIND BEAST, on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Unsuccessful fashion model Aki Shima (Mako Midori, STRAY DOG) finds fame in a series of racy and fetishistic photographs by a provocateur artist Mr. Yamana whose is promoting her as the "new woman of our age." Arriving early at the gallery for a meeting, she spies blind man Michio (Eiji Funakoshi, FIRES ON THE PLAIN) intimately caressing a lifesize nude sculpture of her. She is disturbed and aroused by the remote but intimate contact and runs away. Later that night, she orders a masseuse who turns out to be Michio. Although she demands rough treatment to work her stressed muscles, she balks at the liberties he takes as he claims as a blind man to know her body better than those with working eyes. As she prepares to throw him out of her apartment, he chloroforms her and transports her to his warehouse studio with the help of his mother (Noriko Sengoku, DRUNKEN ANGEL). She awakes in his sprawling studio, the walls of which are adorned with massive sculptures of eyes, lips, limbs, and breasts surrounding to mountainous sculptures of a supine nude woman and prone man. Michio claims that he wants her to be his model in his quest to pioneer the art form of touching. Believing Michio to be a madman, Aki refuses and tries to escape him, but the doors are made of iron and he can find hers anywhere with his sense of smell. When Michio's mother prevents her escape, she realizes that she will have to drive a wedge in between mother and son using the power of seduction, the older woman's apparent jealousy, and the son's desire to move from touching to tasting female form.

More read about than seen until its 2004 DVD release, BLIND BEAST cannot entirely live up to the brief but tantalizing capsule review published in Phil Hardy's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HORROR MOVIES. Although the film's nudity and sexual content is quite restrained next to what was starting to come out from Nikkatsu, the content is still quite strong conceptually rather than graphically. Based on a story by early Showa era pulp writer Edogawa Rampo (THE WATCHER IN THE ATTIC), the scenario is ripe for obsession and exploitation but the execution is not entirely successful. Michio never actually convinces as anything more than the perverted manchild Aki initially perceives, and it is just as well that she is the story's narrator since it is through her narration that the film conveys something akin to the female agency cited throughout the work of director Yasuzô Masumura (IREZUMI, GIANTS AND TOYS). It is actually through Aki's "eyes" that Michio perversions turn into fatal obsession, as it takes her desire to turn his arrested development backwards "to the womb of human creation" through turning sensual pleasure into the most "primeval" sensations of the "lower orders of life" where death and darkness awaits those who venture to edge of existence where licking becomes biting, beating, and hacking. It is just as well that Rampo's source story was not adapted later on in the pink or Roman Porno cycles as the more permissive depictions of sex and sexualized violence might overwhelm the subject.

Given scant subtitled release in US theaters in Japanese communities, BLIND BEAST finally arrived on English-friendly DVD from Fantoma Films in 2001. Arrow is not specific about the source material for their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray, but greatly enhanced over the DVD is the sense of texture not only in hair and bare flesh but in the massive sculptures which seem cold and forbidding rather than inviting as the two main characters copulate constantly on their surfaces. Colors rarely pop, but this is by design since there is little blood and the color scheme is restricted to blacks, grays, browns, and cool colors. The Japanese LPCM 1.0 mono track is clean if not as impressively bold as some of the higher end Toho mono tracks, but it effectively delivers the post-synched dialogue, effects, and the wonderfully symphonic score of Hikaru Hayashi. Optional English subtitles are provided.

The Fantoma DVD only offered a trailer, but Arrow have provided a handful of new extras for the Blu-ray. First up is an audio commentary by Asian cinema scholar Earl Jackson who notes the ways in which the film plays with differing modes of access (we can see what Michio cannot but are denied his sensations of touch, smell, and taste, as well as the power dynamics at play in the film in which Michio simultaneously exults and negates Aki's existence, claiming to want to be her slave if she will be his model but ignoring her lack of consent. He further discusses how similar themes run through the filmographies of director Masumura and screenwriter Yoshio Shirasaka (RAPE! 13TH HOUR).